


Freckles

by SpaceBitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Derek Nurse Is a Dumbass English Major, First Kiss, Getting Together, M/M, Poetry, jealousy? kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 14:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16176641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceBitch/pseuds/SpaceBitch
Summary: Someone writes William Poindexter a poem. It's really good.And it wasn't Derek Nurse.





	Freckles

**Author's Note:**

> Hi y'all! Please just pretend my poetry is actually good when the characters say it is lol

William Poindexter was wheeling someone, but for the life of them, no one in the haus could get him to confess who.

Nursey noticed it first, entirely on accident. Dex had walked into the kitchen, shoulders at least two inches lower than they usually were, expression calm, and when Nursey knocked over his water, Dex just laughed and said, "Don't worry, I'll clean it up."

Nursey stared at him, shocked. The shock had to be the reason he said something as stupid as what he said next: "Whoa, bro, who took the stick out of your ass? You're acting... weird."

Unfortunately for Dex, Ransom, Holster, AND Shitty were all in the kitchen (preparing for the kegster that night) when Nursey said this, and the way they all immediately stopped their conversation and zeroed in on him was truly frightening. Dex barely had time to give Nurse the stink eye before he was being devoured by their well-meaning but invasive friends. Nursey wanted to join in on the chirping, but he realized he was feeling a little bit sick to his stomach, so he escaped upstairs.

Despite this, or maybe because of it, Nursey was the first person Dex told. 

A couple days later he _still_ hadn't cracked, to the endless irritation of Ransom's spreadsheets. They were hanging out in the library with Chow, but when Chris went to the snack shack downstairs, Dex tapped Nursey's foot with his.

"Hey," he said, which made Nurse's heart start thumping a little bit harder, because what could he possibly have to say that Chowder couldn't hear? And Dex's expression didn't help. He looked... nervous. And a bit vulnerable, like he was made of glass, which of course was never a good combination with Derek's clumsy ass.

"Yeah?" he said, trying to be delicate.

"I kind of have a question."

"What's it about?"

"Well, it's about... poetry," he said, looking anywhere but Nursey's eyes.

"Poetry? Bro, have you been holding out on me?? Do you need me to critique your couplets? I'll do it, I promise, there is nothing I want more than to read poetry written by Mr. Grumpy—"

"Shut up," Dex laughed, the tension eased a little bit. "No, it's not my poetry. It was written... well. It's kind of, um, about me. And I want you to tell me if it's good."

Nursey's heart plunged into a cold lake. "Oh, for real? Well, I mean, there isn't really such a thing as bad poetry, you know. I'm not elitist about that sort of thing." The look on Dex's face told him that was the wrong answer. "But, I mean, I'll take a look. Do you have it with you?"

Dex wordlessly handed it over, and Derek read.

 

"I've never been very religious  
I believe in entropy and science, experiments and evidence, gravity and stars  
But then I look and I swear, there is something in the glow of your golden eyes and well  
that is an unexplained phenomena if I've ever seen one  
And perhaps you were always meant to disprove my hypothesis  
Because I swear  
I found Virgo in the constellations on your collarbones  
And there must be a gravity around you  
because I feel it like a tug on my sternum when you leave  
And if there is a God, he must be a sadist  
Because I am sure he made you and thought,  
"Here is a smile they will start wars for.""

 

There was a lot going through Derek Nurse's head.

First, his English major brain started critiquing it: _too short, not a very smooth flow, some odd sentence structures._

Then he thought, _God, who could describe Dex in cliches. Gravity? Constellations? I would have said—_

Then he stopped himself. And started to panic. And realized this person was really in love with Dex, because duh. They weren't wrong about the smile.

He glanced down and saw he'd been gripping the page tight enough to crinkle, and smoothed it onto the table.

"So?" Dex said, searching Nursey's face almost desperately. "Is it good? Do—do you like it?"

Nurse almost laughed at that. Was it good? Yeah, maybe. Did he like it?

Fuck no.

He focused on the first question.

"Um, well, I really liked the way she tied the subject to her questioning religion and science, almost making him a messiah-like figure, and the continuity of that metaphor—"

"Nurse. This isn't workshop. I asked you if you liked it."

Derek tried to imagine that he'd been presented this piece in workshop, and not by his d-partner, who was currently giving him the most unbearably eager expression. Nursey couldn't imagine why his opinion mattered to Dex, but he glared down at the paper and said, "Yeah, overall, I liked it."

Dex stared at him for another really long moment, and Nursey didn't know what to do with his hands, and then Dex grabbed the paper and shuffled it around.

"So. I mean, not to pry, but obviously—"

"His name's Evan," Dex said. "I met him at that Sunday kegster, the day party. He told me he wanted me to 'look' at his poem, but it's obviously about me, and I don't know. He's really nice and cute and it's just." Dex sighed, avoiding Nurse's eyes. "It's nice to know someone looks at me like that. That someone could, in any fucking universe, describe my eyes as 'unexplainable phenomena.' But I didn't know if it was just bullshit or what, so I wanted to show it to—to you."

Dex finally looked him in the eye again, and—oh. Nursey had been so fucking stupid, he was so mad he hadn't thought of writing poetry about Dex's eyes first. They were so raw, so expressive. He was a tad dumbstuck, until he managed to sputter out, "Well, do you—do you like him too?"

"I think I could," he said, like it was a confession. He looked away, toward the window, and Nursey really wished he was a photographer in that moment, so he could capture that look. "I really think I could."

//

In the end, Evan gave himself away.

Dex and Nursey were sitting alone at the kitchen table, with Bitty humming happily at the counter, when Derek saw it.

Before he could help himself, he whispered to his phone, "Oh, you know not what you do." 

This earned him a very confused look from Dex. He simply handed over his phone, watching Dex's eyes bug out, as he raced to unlock his own phone and delete the incriminating evidence.

It was too late. They heard the loud, "Dude!" followed by Holster's booming "DUDE!!!" before Dex had even pulled up instagram. Ransom was on insta almost as much as Bitty was on twitter.

Dex's fate was sealed.

"Ummmmm DEX?" came Holster's voice down the stairs before he thundered into the kitchen. "Who is this HOTTIE commenting WINKY FACE EMOJIS on your selfies??"

"It's not a selfie—"

"Actually Holtz, I believe the comment in question was, 'looking good dex,' _then_ the winky face emoji."

"Oh, of course, how could I be so foolish."

"Did y'all already send the screenshot to the gc?" Bitty asked, looking down at his continuously vibrating phone. "Oh, give Dex a break, will ya?"

"Yeah, I would love to, Bitty," Rans said, grinning at his phone with what could only be called malicious glee, "but it turns out Dex's new boo-thang has been posting delightful candids of our boy here along with captions written in— _wait for it_ —free verse poetry."

"How the fuck did you find--? He's on private!" Dex objected, the confusion momentarily distracting him from hiding his very red face.

"Dude, this kid can write," Holster said. "Are you sure he's not only dating you for an excuse to write autumnal prose?"

"YES!" Rans yelled. "The poetry drew her in! Lardo joined the flaming!"

"GOD," Dex groaned, muffled into his sleeves since he was facedown on the table. "LET ME DIE HERE.”

"Now, of course we all support you and your sexuality, but in the interest of equal opportunity chirping—"

"SHUT UP HOLSTER!"

//

The real problem began when Nursey went to his poetry writing seminar on Wednesday, because now he knew what Evan looked like. He’d put a face to the poem, and discovered the proof confirming Evan’s sadist theory that God was personally TiVo-ing Derek’s Actual Life and laughing his ass off, because Evan?

Evan was in Derek’s poetry writing seminar.

Even better, when the prof counted them off into groups for mini-workshop sessions, Evan was in his group.

Guess which poem he brought to workshop?

Derek would have been the first to admit that he maybe didn’t handle the situation as maturely as possible. He had a reputation in their class of being opinionated, but even he knew as the words were coming out of his mouth that he was going overboard. He talked about this metaphor not hitting _just_ right, that line maybe wasn’t totally accurate? (After all, he did know who the poem was about. He could judge accuracy.) By the end of class, he had practically rewritten the whole thing for him, but to his credit, Evan took the whole thing like a champ, taking notes on everything Derek said.

“By the way, are you married to the whole second-person thing?” Derek said, hating the words even as they came out of his own mouth.

“Um, well, I kind of conceptualized it as a literal love letter. Like, I wanted to evoke the feeling in the reader of like, the person who I love is pouring out their soul to me in an ode, and all that’s missing is some cursive and a postage stamp in the corner,” he said.

“That’s a really cool idea,” Derek gritted out, mostly because he meant it. “Is that why it’s so vague?” he asked, because maybe there was hope. Maybe he really just wanted Dex to read his poem.

“What?” Evan replied, looking surprised.

“Well, I mean, you don’t have any particular details in it: this could be about anyone. Did you do that intentionally so the reader could envision it being addressed to them?” And, honestly. His prying was getting a little pathetically obvious now.

“Oh. Um, I guess you’re right, but that wasn’t intentional. Actually, it is about a really specific person. Ha, guess it’s just the closeted queer kid in me, avoiding any obvious markers of gender or whatever. You’re totally right, I’ll work on that.”

Derek sunk back into his seat, real guilt settling on his chest as their groupmates sent Evan sympathetic looks.

It would have been much easier to hate Evan if Derek didn’t like him so much.

//

He didn’t mean to write the poem.

Honest. It just spilled out of his fingers, typed into a shame-note on his phone, not even titled.

Well, until the third draft. Then he titled the note, “Freckles.” And then he had to transfer it to google docs, where all his poetry went, just to be safe.

And somehow, some way, Derek ended up in the library printing out 20 copies for his entire workshop to read.

It wasn’t that he hated himself; nor even that he was convinced that it was that great of a poem. The whole “having feelings for Dex” thing was too confusing and intense and new for him to be able to be objective at all. It was just, he’d procrastinated the hell out of the assignment, since he'd had two essays due the same week and thought, “It’s a poetry prompt. I have notebooks stuffed with poetry. I’m sure I have something.”

Except, then it was the night before Wednesday, and he realized he didn’t have anything that fit the prompt.

Well. Except one poem.

Which was how he printed out and handed his own ode to Dex right into his boyfriend’s fucking arms.

Oh yeah, because that was a thing.

A couple weeks ago, half the team had “accidentally” run into Dex and Evan on a date, where Dex had introduced Evan as his boyfriend and Evan had tried to chat with  
Nursey about their seminar and Nursey had excused himself to the bathroom, to quiet his shaking hands.

Since then, whenever Dex went to kegsters and the bars and even a house party at one of Rans's Weird Sciencey Friends's place, Evan was with him. Which like. If you didn't know they were together, you probably wouldn't even guess it. Nursey had never seen them kiss, and the most PDA he'd spotted was Dex dragging Evan out of a kegster by his hand. Technically. But the thing was, Dex was so...different when he was with Evan. Evan made him laugh, like belly laugh, all the time. Dex was constantly smiling or laughing or joking whenever Evan was in the room, and Nursey really just could not deal. If he'd thought he had it bad before, that was literally a joke compared to the sight of Dex animatedly telling a funny story, swinging his arms everywhere, barely able to finish for laughing so hard.

The problem was that he wasn't telling the story to Nursey.

All this, maybe, possibly, Nursey could handle. He could move on. If Dex hadn't walked into their room looking extremely distraught less than a week ago.

Well. Extremely distraught on Dex looked like mildly perturbed on most other people but Nursey could read Dex pretty well at this point.

"Dex?" he said, "Are you alright?"

He expected a brush-off, like every other time Nursey inquired after his emotional state. What he got was, "I don't know."

Nurse swiveled away from his laptop, full attention to Dex. "What's up?"

Dex gave a frustrated huff. "It's just...ugh. It's gonna sound shitty."

Nursey raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

Dex huffed again. "Okay. But I might not say it right. Um, so Evan has some... mental health issues. Which is fine! That isn't the problem. I like all of who he is, not just... ugh. The problem is... I don't think he's really... dealing with it?"

Nursey kept his face impassive. Dex knew about Nursey's mental health struggles as well, and yet he chose to come to him for this. He would withhold judgement until Dex said what he had to say.

"Like he... he makes me happy, and he makes me laugh, and he makes me feel good about myself. But he puts himself down _all_ the time. And I don't think he's fishing for compliments or reassurance or anything, but it feels like, if I don't reassure him every time, I'm just feeding into it and reaffirming those thoughts and making everything worse. And that's like, a lot of pressure? And he has some really concerning symptoms. Like, he'll just casually drop that he had a panic attack in class or that he dissociated for hours this morning and I don't know what to do. I don't know how to help. I can't, I am so not qualified for that. So I'll be like, 'maybe you should see a therapist or get a diagnosis or like...talk to someone'? And he'll just be like 'I probably should' and then do nothing. And I try to tell him nothing will change or get better if he doesn't do _anything_ , and I'm just starting to feel like if I don't make his mental health a priority then no one will, and because I care about him, I want to see him, I don't know, be okay. But that means taking it _all_ on, and I just, I don't, I've been monologuing about this for long enough and please help."

Nursey nodded, face still carefully composed. He'd been in a similar situation with a cousin, and told Dex he was on the right track and had to take care of himself first, and to talk to Evan about it first, and if after that he couldn't prove he was making an effort to improve his health then Dex should end the relationship. All in all,  
Nurse was quite proud with his maturity in handling the situation, and could sleep well knowing he gave Dex the advice he would give anyone.

Except.

Knowing this was so detrimental to Nursey's dumbass feelings-for-Dex heart balloon, which expanded with shallow, selfish hope with the knowledge that Dex wasn't totally happy and that Evan had, like, at least one flaw.

It was the stupid balloon that had made him write the poem in the first place. He just had to let some of the air out before it popped. How could he have known it would end up like this?

He reread the poem nervously while class was winding down, tuning out the prof's droning about atmosphere.

 

i bet you heard that your freckles were constellations, stars scattered across shoulders  
but i have never heard something so wrong  
stars are dead things, explosions of heat and gas, and what we see are the remnants of light, hanging on only to the echo  
but your skin is a living masterpiece  
a splattered miracle of pigment and sundrops and pointilism  
you might be the water droplets that bead up on the car ride home, as i watch two drops race each other to avoid looking at your hair or your eyes or your freckled fists on the wheel, because i know if i look i will do something stupid like fall in love—  
but it's too late. i didn't see it coming because i always thought it would be gradual, but all it takes is for me to see the fireworks of freckles on your sternum, permanently burned onto your skin like the imprint of the sun on the back of my eyes  
and it explodes in my chest, this thing that i let happen  
so no, dear, you are not like the constellations  
so fickle, disappearing every morning, hiding behind the clouds  
your freckles are like freckles  
because i have tried and tried, but i cannot for the life of me think of a more beautiful word

 

An elbow in his side jolted him back to class. It was Evan's.

"Can't wait to read your poem!" he said.

"Haha, thanks," he said.

Haha, fuck, he thought.

//

"Nurse. I read your poem."

Nursey's eyes tracked slowly up from his reading to the puppy-dog eyed boy in front of him. Evan. Shit.

"I can explain," he said.

Evan slid into the booth next to him at Annie's. "I need your advice."

Nursey repeated Evan's word in his brain once, and then twice, and then a third time, really breaking down each word, and he was still confused. "What?"

"With Dex. I have eyes. You obviously really care about him. Like, you're in love with him, I mean. And maybe that makes me stupid for asking you, but I don't really have anyone else I know who'll hear what I have to say and have Dex's best interests at heart, and so I'm trusting you to be honest with me, because I don't really think I'm capable of being honest with myself right now."

"I'm sorry, are you asking me for relationship advice?" The words left his own mouth but they still didn't make sense.

"Kind of. It's just. Has Dex told you anything about me?"

He knew what Evan was asking. "He told me you had some mental health issues, yeah. And that it's been... well. A support system can't be one person."

Evan nodded, like this was what he had been wanting to hear, which only succeeded in confusing Nursey more.

"Yes. Exactly. So. I wanted to ask someone who actually knew Dex about it, because I don't think he's being honest with me. I mean, I think he's trying to hide his feelings because he's afraid it will like, break me, or make me feel worse, or whatever. I guess my question is... am I hurting him?"

And, fuck. All of Nursey's irrational dislike of Evan flew out the window when he heard that soft little question, Evan's voice almost too raw to bear.

Which was why Nursey knew he was being honest when he whispered, "Yes." He rushed on to amend, "Well, it's not actually your mental illness, whatever that is, Dex never specified. It's that Dex feels like the responsibility for your mental well-being is entirely on his shoulders, which is not healthy for anyone to feel, ever. He really cares about you, Evan. But from what I gather, you're putting a lot of weight on him. You need to have someone else besides Dex: your family, other friends, maybe a therapist. Okay, no, as someone with bipolar, you actually should definitely have a therapist. But it's gonna take a while, dude. And until then... yeah. You are hurting him."

The fucking look in his eyes, man. "I need him," he said.

"I know," Nursey replied. "Which is probably why you have to let him go."

Evan sighed, a release of understanding, of learning something you already knew. "Thank you. I just needed someone to say it out loud to me." He looked down at his hands, picking the skin off the side of the nail. "Um. Do you know how... where would I find a good therapist? Do you think?"

//

Things after that were harder. But also better.

Dex was devastated, he was. But Nursey could also see the relief in the set of his shoulders. That Evan would be okay, or he was on his way to being okay, and it wasn't Dex's job to fix him. Or anyone's job but Evan's, honestly. Nursey had almost forgotten the whole ode to Dex thing.

Almost.

Until Dex burst into their room, paper in hand, yelling, "Hey, Nurse? What the fuck is this?"

Nursey froze at his desk. He didn't have to look. He could feel the words on the paper in the room with them, haunting him. Why did he have to be so melo-fucking-dramatic all the time?

"What's what?" he said instead of all that, swiveling around calmly, thinking maybe if he acted chill his blood pressure would be fooled and decrease. 

(Or maybe it would increase just enough that he could have a heart attack and be in the ER and not this room?)

"Nursey. Please don't insult my intelligence."

He risked a glance up to Dex's face, which didn't look mad or embarrassed or any of the emotions Nursey would immediately associate with an unwanted love confession.

"Look, you were never supposed to see it, okay—"

Dex let out a laugh, one of those laughs when there's some sort of emotion in you and you don't really know where to put it and it just bursts out into a laugh. Nursey thought of volcanoes and pillow fights and popped balloons. His fingers itched for a pencil.

"Oh, so you were just gonna let me be ignorant forever? You were really never gonna tell me this is how you feel?"

"I—" Nursey watched Dex's face, but he really couldn't reconcile Dex's tone with his words with his face. They were all criss-crossed, like Dex's eyelashes when he woke up from a nap.

His hand actually made it all the way to the pen on his desk, screaming to write it all down, before he forced it to return back to his lap just to fiddle with. It wasn't his fault Dex looked so beautiful like this. So alive.

"I don't know what you want me to say."

This was clearly not the right thing, because he saw the irritation settle into Dex's face, like tinder on a campfire, before he closed his eyes, leaning back, and breathing in deep.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to come in here picking a fight. I _want_ you to be honest with me. Please."

"I—" Three seconds ago, he'd been composing poetry, prose, metaphors about his feelings. And yet somehow in this moment, he couldn't think of one single thing to say. 

"I'm obsessed with you," he blurted. "It's kind of embarrassing, actually. I think about you literally all the time. And I always write what I'm thinking about. So I wrote that."

Dex shook his head, his lips turned up faintly in disbelief, like he was laughing at a joke no one had told yet. "I'm sorry, when did you write this?"

"Um...like... a month ago? I think? Maybe."

Dex's eyes closed, like he was having trouble with the math. Dex was really excellent at math.

"So you're telling me you've liked me about as long as I've been with Evan."

Nursey mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like "maybe."

"What about his poem?"

Nurse blinked. "What about it?"

This time Dex really did laugh. It sounded a bit delirious. "When I showed you his poem! Did you really think I wanted your opinion on his prose?"

Nursey said nothing, but the look on his face probably betrayed that yes, that was what he'd thought.

"For someone who can write such brilliant shit—" he waved the paper around, "—you really are dense sometimes. I was giving you a chance! To say something, to stop me, I don't know. But then you said you _liked_ it, so I thought, 'well, that settles it, he's not into me. Time to move on.' And then I did. And then you have the _audacity_ to write _this_ motherfucking—"

Dex looked like he was edging into full on rant mode, so Derek stood up quickly and interrupted with, "Hey Dex?"

Dex hit the brakes, looking up at Nursey like he very much wanted to finish. "What?"

"Can I kiss you?"

And, man. Dex was so beautiful like this, arms askew in the middle of the point he'd been making, hair mussed, face confused, like his words had stopped but his brain was veering off course. He kind of looked like a mess. Derek's heart swelled.

"Okay," he said.

Derek rushed in, worried if he waited any longer Dex would keep talking.

He didn't.

Dex's hands found Nurse's waist, paper still in hand, gripping at his back and grabbing him, pulling him closer. Nursey framed his hands around Dex's face, dragging him into the kiss. One of his hands gripped at the back of Dex's neck, sliding up over his short hair, like he'd wanted to do for months.

His mouth was so warm, just like the rest of him, but more, somehow. Nursey opened his mouth, sucking on Dex's lip. Dex's hand reflexively squeezed Nursey's waist. Before he could get too cocky about that, Dex caught Nursey's bottom lip in his teeth, scraping slow over it, sending chills down his scalp over his whole body.

"Wait, wait, wait," Dex said, pulling away, kinda, in the sense that his mouth was no longer attached to Nursey's, but he was still pretty entwined all up in Derek. He leaned his head down to catch his breath, his panting blowing over Derek's neck, giving Derek the mental image of Dex kissing him there, which, _fuck_ —

"I was gonna say something," Dex said, eyes still looking kind of scrambled.

"Mm-hmm," Derek hummed, leaning in close again. One of Dex's hands left Nursey's waist and brushed his own lips, and yeah, Nursey knew the feeling. His mouth was literally humming, floating away from the rest of him.

"I can't remember," Dex said, grinning, already leaning back into Derek.

"That's okay," Derek murmured against Dex's pulse, which he could actually feel thrumming rapidly against his lips. "We have time."

And he kissed and kissed and kissed him, until there wasn't a single freckle left untouched.

**Author's Note:**

> okay notes:  
> 1) my first ever nurseydex fic! :D pls be nice lmao  
> 2) sorry for like how in-depth we got with the whole mental health thing, I didn't want the breakup to be Nursey's fault and I didn't want Evan to be a Shithead so this seemed like a pretty good its-no-ones-fault solution  
> 3) the timelines fucked i know shh dont talk about it  
> 4) follow my tumblr @nurseydexunsolved! send me prompts and I'll love u forever  
> Kudos and comments much appreciated! :) thanks for reading peace out yall


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